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Here's a purely speculative analysis of what's really going on with "Superhuman": Most of those users paying $30/month are trying to figure out how an applicat

Here's a purely speculative analysis of what's really going on with "Superhuman": Most of those users paying $30/month are trying to figure out how an application with such a mundane use-case could possibly charge that much. This is a more elaborate version of the "I'll tell you the secret to getting rich if you buy my product" marketing scheme. The secret, it turns out, is to sell people the secret to getting rich. The fact that this product is invite-only neatly obfuscates that this approach doesn't scale beyond a small niche of users. There's no conversion rate that would show that this product actually performs above-average.

mastermojo 6y ago
Heres an article where Paul Graham in 2012 calls out Gmail for being slow, and stating that he would be willing to pay $50-$1000 a month for a good email experience. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html
- incrudible 6y ago
  This is the demographic you're talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw
UweSchmidt 6y ago
Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost. Increasing the price is often the correct strategy, and the flood of comments on it might be a (vital) consumer defense mechanism against sophisticated marketing and pricing strategies.
- incrudible 6y ago
  > Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost. In general, targeting the people who literally don't care about price will not maximize profit. There are of course luxury brands that do target these people exclusively, but they aren't big companies. Apple is a very strong brand so they can achieve high markups, but even they have price ceilings on what's reasonable, at least for their bread-and-butter products. Moreover, you can not just "decide" to be profitable like Apple by imitating its approach to product design and pricing. That is not to say that you can't build a profitable company targeting the particular niche of users ready to spend $30/month for an email client. You just can't scale it.
  - thenanyu 6y ago
    I think you’re right that Superhuman is a luxury product. The luxury segment is pretty underexplored in software. LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B. There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience!
    - incrudible 6y ago
      > The luxury segment is pretty underexplored in software. An attempt was made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich > LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B. There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience! LVMH is a huge conglomerate of brands. I would argue that most of these brands are in fact not targeting the "price-insensitive" demographic, but those buying "premium goods", which isn't quite the same. If you did a revenue breakdown, you'd probably see that the bulk doesn't come from Louis Vuitton purses, but rather from products that the middle class can afford - similar to Apple.
harryf 6y ago
The problem for them is the “we threw amazing design at this so it’s better” sales pitch stopped being convincing in 2018. Good design is nice yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that email is email and email is broken. Email continues to suck because the one company that dominates it (Google) has stopped trying to innovate. The most promising attempt to improve E-Mail in years - Google Inbox - was shutdown and officially “merged” into Gmail but it reality what got merged was lip service to Inbox. The basic problem with E-Mail still today after years is 80% of the time spent in it is wasted time. Everything from junk to conversations you didn’t need to be part of, people you don’t even know contacting you to “misuse“ by connecting things like the build system to your email so you get the same message every day that you never read. Add to this that 40%+ of people now ignore their emails so you never know if you’re getting a reply. And from a user perspective - email doesn’t scale - the moment you start interacting with 100’s or 1000’s of people, the brokenness of email turns into insanity. So making you “faster at emails with our beautiful design” is not solving the real problem, it’s just making a faster hamster wheel. The real problem is most of the emails you read every day were a waste of your time. And what’s even crazier is you have people saying “well I’ve developed my emailing system over the years that allows me to survive” when in fact people should be screaming “email is broken and needs to die”. Phew ... first email rant of 2021 done. Next up... JIRA

mastermojo 6y ago

Heres an article where Paul Graham in 2012 calls out Gmail for being slow, and stating that he would be willing to pay $50-$1000 a month for a good email experience. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html

incrudible 6y ago
This is the demographic you're talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nl_Qyk9DSUw

UweSchmidt 6y ago

Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost. Increasing the price is often the correct strategy, and the flood of comments on it might be a (vital) consumer defense mechanism against sophisticated marketing and pricing strategies.

incrudible 6y ago
> Maybe there are simply enough people who have the disposable income or are just bad with money that they don't care what an email program, or the new Apple headphones cost. In general, targeting the people who literally don't care about price will not maximize profit. There are of course luxury brands that do target these people exclusively, but they aren't big companies. Apple is a very strong brand so they can achieve high markups, but even they have price ceilings on what's reasonable, at least for their bread-and-butter products. Moreover, you can not just "decide" to be profitable like Apple by imitating its approach to product design and pricing. That is not to say that you can't build a profitable company targeting the particular niche of users ready to spend $30/month for an email client. You just can't scale it.
- thenanyu 6y ago
  I think you’re right that Superhuman is a luxury product. The luxury segment is pretty underexplored in software. LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B. There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience!
  - incrudible 6y ago
    > The luxury segment is pretty underexplored in software. An attempt was made: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich > LVMH’s market cap is north of 300B. There’s plenty of scale in the price insensitive audience! LVMH is a huge conglomerate of brands. I would argue that most of these brands are in fact not targeting the "price-insensitive" demographic, but those buying "premium goods", which isn't quite the same. If you did a revenue breakdown, you'd probably see that the bulk doesn't come from Louis Vuitton purses, but rather from products that the middle class can afford - similar to Apple.

harryf 6y ago

The problem for them is the “we threw amazing design at this so it’s better” sales pitch stopped being convincing in 2018. Good design is nice yes, but it doesn’t change the fact that email is email and email is broken. Email continues to suck because the one company that dominates it (Google) has stopped trying to innovate. The most promising attempt to improve E-Mail in years - Google Inbox - was shutdown and officially “merged” into Gmail but it reality what got merged was lip service to Inbox. The basic problem with E-Mail still today after years is 80% of the time spent in it is wasted time. Everything from junk to conversations you didn’t need to be part of, people you don’t even know contacting you to “misuse“ by connecting things like the build system to your email so you get the same message every day that you never read. Add to this that 40%+ of people now ignore their emails so you never know if you’re getting a reply. And from a user perspective - email doesn’t scale - the moment you start interacting with 100’s or 1000’s of people, the brokenness of email turns into insanity. So making you “faster at emails with our beautiful design” is not solving the real problem, it’s just making a faster hamster wheel. The real problem is most of the emails you read every day were a waste of your time. And what’s even crazier is you have people saying “well I’ve developed my emailing system over the years that allows me to survive” when in fact people should be screaming “email is broken and needs to die”. Phew ... first email rant of 2021 done. Next up... JIRA